Myanmar our neighbour has one of the lowest electrification density in Asia. Around 60 percent of the population lack access to electricity. According to an 2016 international report published on Renewable and Sustainable Energy i 70 percent of the country lives in rural communities where electrification access averages just about 16 percent.
So to help the neighbours, India is planning to set up a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Myanmar, India’s Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan announced recently. The Indian Government has already approved plans to establish similar energy facilities in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
“Indian Oil Corp (IOC) is in talks with Myanmar companies for setting up LPG storage facilities and Petronet LNG is working on setting up an LNG terminal there,” Pradhan said while speaking at a seminar on ‘Assessing India’s Connectivity with Its Neighborhood’ in New Delhi.
For the past year, even China in securing energy-related partnerships with neighbours throughout South Asia and therefore India too is stepping into this field to further up lift the living standards of the entire region.
Since last year, Indian oil companies have been exploring options to supply petroleum products to Myanmar via land. China and Myanmar, in April 2017 have also signed an agreement to build a 771-kilometre crude oil pipeline at a cost of $1.5 billion, which would allow China to import 22 million tons of crude oil per year through the Bay of Bengal.
In Sri Lanka, India is working on setting up an LNG terminal and a 500 MW LNG-fired power plant near Colombo.”Also, Indian companies are working on connecting India’s gas grid with that of Bangladesh and supplying gas for power generation at Khulna Power Plant,” Pradhan said, adding that Petronet is also looking at building a 7.5 million metric ton per year LNG import terminal in Bangladesh to feed that country’s energy needs using imported gas.
India has already signed up with Gazprom of Russia and the Australian government to fulfill neighboring Bangladesh’ LNG requirement.
